Page 1 of You, with a View

One

I wake up to two million views.

I don’t know it at first. With my eyes closed, my hand traverses the obstacle course of cups, food wrappers, and ChapStick tubes on my nightstand to find my phone. All I want is to know the time.

Or maybe I don’t. From the sunlight piercing my screwed-shut eyelids, it’s embarrassingly late.

My fingers wrap around the charger cord, and I drag the phone across the nightstand, knocking the ChapSticks down like bowling pins.

Whatever. Future Noelle can deal with that mess.

I finally get a hand on my prize and illuminate the screen. But instead of the time, my bleary eyes snag on an avalanche of TikTok notifications. Even as I blink at the astronomical number, it keeps ticking, growing by five, by seventeen, by forty-two.

“What the hell,” I croak.

Then I remember: my video.

My already sleep-weak grip fails me, and the phone drops onto my face.

The door flies open at my pained howl. Through watery eyes, I make out the general shape of my mom. “Noelle, what in the world?”

If this were a sitcom, this is where it would freeze: on me, twenty-eight years old, rolling around in my childhood bed, blinded in a freak iPhone accident after going viral on a social media app meant for teenagers.

The only thing that doesn’t make me want to die inside is how many people have seen this video. My heart skips a beat. Maybe even theright person.

I knife into a seated position, my fingers pressed against my aching orbital bone as I fumble for my phone. From the doorway, Mom watches in bafflement, decked out in Peloton gear instead of a power suit. Must be Saturday.

“Are you okay?” Brown eyes that match mine slide to the bike in the corner of the room. On the wall, a neon sign cheersbe awesome.

I can tell she’s dying to turn it on. I wish I could tear it down. Nothing like waking up to aggressive positivity every morning when you’re a grown adult who had to move back into your parents’ house after getting laid off from a job you didn’t even like.

“Yes, Mom, I’m great.” I sigh, a headache blooming. “Just dropped my phone on my face.”

“Sorry, sweetie. Hey! Since you’re up, I’m going to get a quick ride in.”

She says all of this in one breath, already at the bike with her special, extra-loud shoes in hand. The number of times she’s woken me clacking across the hardwood these past four months can’t be counted on all my appendages. It’s not her fault she turned mychildhood bedroom into a shrine to her two-thousand-dollar bike, though. None of us anticipated I’d be here again.

“Do your thing.” I burrow back under my duvet and pull up my account on TikTok, my heart pounding.

Right there, on my latest video posted just over a week ago, is the number of views: 2.3 million. There are over four hundred thousand likes and sixteen hundred comments.

Holy shit.

What the hell happened? When I fell asleep at nine last night, I held steady at a paltry eighty likes. And, most crushingly, no comments.

My expectations were low, but they should’ve been lower. I created the account last September on a bored whim, then started posting my photography after seeing other photography accounts take off, though no one gave a shit about mine.

But hope starts with a seed, right? At least, that’s what my gram used to tell me with a wink.

I keep all of the advice she gave me tucked in my pocket for when I need it, which was often before her death, and near constant now that she’s gone. She was a fixture in my life from the start, the person I turned to when anything happened, good or bad. It’s unconventional to call a grandparent your best friend, but Gram was mine from the time I knew what best friends were.

It took two months after she died before I could look at pictures of her without instantly crying. I have a voicemail of her singing “Happy Birthday” that I can’t listen to, even six months later.

But this video—the one that now has millions of views—is as much a love letter to her as it is a question to the universe. Or a plea.

When you find out your grandmother had a secret lover whenshe was twenty, you want to know more. And when she’s not around to answer the tornado of questions that kicked up the second you pulled those pictures out of a timeworn envelope in a box transferred from a dusty corner in her garage? Well, you have to find alternate means.

My dad was my first stop. I asked if he knew anything about Gram’s romantic history, keeping it vague. I had to tread lightly—if he didn’t know about the relationship, it might upset him. His grief was still as raw as mine.

---